ties, not with fictions. He, on this ground, objected even
to Shakespeare's expression —

' And gives to airy Jiofhing
' A local habitation and a name. '

He said the things imagination saw were as much realities as
were gross and tangible facts. He would tell his artist-
friends, ' You have the same faculty as I (the visionary),

* only you do not trust or cultivate it. You can see what I
'do, if you choose.^ In a similiar spirit was his advice to a
young painter : * You have only to work up imagination to

* the state of vision, and the thing is done.' After all, he did
but use the word vision in precisely the same sense in which
Wordsworth uses it to designate the poet's special endow-
ment ; as when he speaks of Chaucer as one

' whose spirit often dwelt



In the clear land of vision.'

The only difference is, that Blake was for applying the word
boldly in detail, instead of merely as a general term. And
why not ? What word could more happily express the truth .'*
In short, his belief in what he himself ' saw in vision,' was not
as in a material, but a spiritual fact — to his mind a more real
kind of fact. The greater importance of the latter was one
of his leading canons. He was, moreover, inclined, meta-
physically, to be a follower of Bishop Berkeley, — a disbeliever
in matter, as I have already said.

Extravagant and apocryphal stories have passed current
about Blake. One — which I believe Leigh Hunt used to tell
— bears internal evidence, to those who understand Blake, of



MAD OR NOT MAD ? 365

having been a fabrication. Once, it is said, the visionary-
man was walking down Cheapside with a friend. Suddenly
he took off his hat and bowed low, ' What did you do that
for ? ' ' Oh ! that was the Apostle Paul.' A story quite out
of keeping with the artist's ordinary demeanour towards his
spiritual visitants, though quite in unison with the accepted
notions as to ghosts and other apparitions with whom the
ghost-seer is traditionally supposed to have tangible personal
relations. Blake's was not that kind of vision. The spirits
which appeared to him did not reveal themselves in palp-
able, hand-shaking guise, nor were they mistaken by him for
bodily facts. He did not claim for them an external, or (in
German slang) an objective existence.

In Blake, imagination was by nature so strong, by himself
had been so much fostered and, amid the solitude in which he
lived, had been so little interfered with by the ideas of others,
that it had grown to a disproportionate height so as to over-
shadow every other faculty. He relied on it as on a revelation
of the Invisible. The appearances thus summoned before his
mental eye were implicitly trusted in, not dismissed as idle
phantoms as an ordinary — even an imaginative — man dis-
misses them. Hence his bond fide 'portraits' of visionary
characters, such as those drawn for John Varley. .rt.nd to
this genuine faith is due the singular difference i7i kind
between his imaginative work and that of nearly every other
painter who has left a record of himself Such is the expla-
nation which all who knew the man personally give of
Avhat seemed mere madness to the world.

And here let us finally dispose of this vexed question of
Blake's ' madness ; ' the stigma which, in its haste to arrive at
some decision on an unusual phenomenon, the world has
fastened on him, as on many other notable men before. Was
he a * glorious madman,' according to the assumption of
those who knew nothing of him personally, little of his works,
nothing of the genesis of them — of the deep though wayward
spiritual currents of which they were the unvarying exponent .''



366 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE.

To Blake's surviving friends — all who knew more of his
character than a few casual interviews could supply — the pro-
position is (I find) simply unintelligible ; thinking of him, as
they do, under the strong influence of happy, fruitful, personal
intercourse remembered in the past ; swayed by the general
tenor of his life, rather than by isolated extravagances of
speech, or wild passages in his writings. All are unanimous
on the point. And I have taken the opinions of many inde-
pendent witnesses. * I saw nothing but sanity,' declares one
(Mr. Calvert) ; ' saw nothing mad in his conduct, actions, or
' character.' Mr. Linnell and Mr Palmer express themselves
in the same sense, and almost in the same words. Another
very unbiassed and intelligent acquaintance — Mr. Finch —
summed up his recollections thus : — ' He was not mad, but
* perverse and wilful ; he reasoned correctly from arbitrary,
' and often false premises.' This, however, is what madmen
have been sometimes defined to do ; grant them their premises,
and their conclusions are right. Nor can I quite concur in it
as characteristic of Blake, who was no reasoner, but pre-
eminently a man of intuitions ; and therefore more often right
as to his premises than his deductions. But, at all events, a
madman's actions are not consonant with sound premises :
Blake's always were. He could throw aside his visionary
mood and his paradoxes when he liked. Mad people try to
conceal their crazes, and in the long run cannot succeed.

' There was nothing mad about him,' emphatically exclaimed
to me Mr. Cornelius Varley ; ' people set down for mad any-
thing different from themselves.' That vigorous veteran, the
late James Ward, who had often met Blake in society and
talked with him, would never hear him called mad. If mad
he were, it was a madness which infected everybody who
came near him ; the wife who all but worshipped him, for
one — whose sanity I never heard doubted ; sensible, practical
Mr. Butts, his almost life-long friend and patron, for another
— who, I have reason to know, reckoned him eccentric, but
nothing worse. The high respect which Flaxman and Fuseli



MAD OR NOT MAD ? 367

always entertained for him I have already referred to. Even
so well-balanced a mind as Gary's (the translator of Dante)
abandoned, after he came to know him, the notion he had
taken up of his ' madness,' and simply pronounced him an
' enthusiast.' Evidently this was the light in which he was
regarded throughout life by all who had personal relations
with him : Paine at one time, Cromek at another, Hayley at
another ; the first two, men of sufficiently ««-visionary, the
last of sufficiently commonplace, intellect. So, too, by honest,
prosaic John Thomas Smith who had known Blake as a
young man. He commences a notice of him with the
declaration a propos of what he calls this ' stigma of eccen-
' tricity.' ' I believe it has been invariably the custom of
' every age, whenever a man has been found to depart from
' the usual mode of thinking, to consider him of deranged
' intellect, and not unfrequently, stark, staring mad.' And he
quotes Cowper's words, when writing to Lady Hesketh,
speaking of a dancing master's advertisement ; — * The author
' of it had the good hap to be crazed, or he had never pro-
' duced anything half so clever ; for you will ever observe that

* they who are said to have lost their wits, have more than
' other people.' ' I could see in Blake's wild enthusiasm and
'extravagance,' writes another of his personal friends, 'only
' the struggle of an ardent mind to deliver itself of the bigness

* and sublimity of its own conceptions,' Even shrewd Allart
Cunningham, a man who lived in an atmosphere of common
sense, had, it is evident, spontaneously adopted a similar
conclusion, and writes of Blake in a manner that tacitly
assumes his sanity. ' Blake's misfortune,' says he, ' was that
' of possessing this precious gift (imagination) in excess-
' His fancy overmastered him, until he at length confounded
' " the mind's eye " with the corporeal organ, and dreamed
' himself out of the sympathies of actual life,' And again :

* Painting, like poetry, has followers the body of whose genius
' is light compared to the length of its wings, and who, rising
' above the ordinary sympathies of our nature, are, like



368 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE.

' Napoleon, betrayed by a star which no eye can see save their
' own. To this rare class belonged William Blake.'

That the present writer shares the view of his predecessors
and of Blake's personal intimates, is doubtless already ap-
parent And, perhaps, the deliberate opinion, on such a
point, of a biographer who has necessarily devoted a bona
fide slice of his life to deciphering the character of him he
writes of, is entitled to some weight, — to more, say, than the
rough and ready decisions, which are based on an isolated
anecdote or two, or on certain incoherent passages in a series
of professedly mystical writings. So far as I am concerned,
I would infinitely rather be mad with William Blake than
sane with nine-tenths of the world. When, indeed, such men
are nicknamed 'mad,' one is brought in contact with the
difficult problem ' What is madness ? ' Who is not mad — in
some other person's sense, himself, perhaps, not the noblest of
created mortals } Who, in certain abstruse cases, is to be the
judge ? Does not prophet or hero always seem ' mad ' to the
respectable mob, and to polished men of the world, the motives
of feeling and action being so alien and incomprehensible }

In a letter respecting Blake, addressed by the late James
Ward, in June, 1855, to his son, George Raphael, the engraver,
the venerable artist gave expression to an interesting view
of his own — itself, some may think, tinged by eccentricity.
'•There can be no doubt,' he writes, ' of his having

* been what the world calls a man of genius. But his

* genius was of a peculiar character, sometimes above, some-
' times below the comprehension of his fellow-men. ... I
' have considered him as amongst the many proofs I have
' witnessed, of men being possessed of different orders of
' spirits now, as well as in the time when the Saviour Christ
' was upon the earth, — although our Established Church (to
' its shame) set itself against it — some good, some evil,
' in their different degrees. It is evident Blake's was not
' an evil one, for he was a good man, the most harmless

' and free from guile. But men, and even our Church, set



MAD OR NOT MAD ? 369

' down everyone who is eccentric as mad. Alas ! how
' many now in Bedlam, are there for disorders of soul

* (spirit), and not of the body ? ' A similar suspicion to this
Blake himself would sometimes hazard, viz. that ' there are
'probably men shut up as mad in Bedlam, who are not so:
' that possibly the madmen outside have shut up the sane

* people.' Which, by the way, is not the kind of talk a mad-
man, or a man conscious of lying under such a suspicion among
his friends, would indulge in. Madmen, and those suspected
of madness, do not make common cause with the mad ; they
rather shun, or take side against them, as animals treat a
diseased or wounded comrade. Above all, a madman, with
his uneasy sense of his own true condition, has a sensitive
horror of so personal a topic and cunningly avoids it.

One ground of the exaggerated misconception of Blake's
eccentricities prevalent among those who had heard about
Blake rather than sat at his feet, — those strange ' visions '
of his, we have accounted for quite consistently with
sanity. As we said, he, in conversation with his friends,
admitted so much, — viz. the inchoate power of others to see
the same things he saw,-— as to elim.inate any outrageous
extravagance from his pretensions as a soothsayer. Bearing
on this point, it is to be remarked that a madman insists on
others seeing as he sees. But Blake did not expect his
companion of the moment, John Varley, or Mrs. Blake, to
behold the visionary spectres summoned from the void before
his eyes, of prophet, king, and poet.

One curious but indubitable historical fact is worth remem-
brance here. It is full of suggestion in connexion with our
present subject. For Blake was, in spirit, a denizen of other
and earlier ages of the world than the present mechanical
one to which chance had rudely transplanted him. It is
within the last century or so, that ' the heavens have gone
further off,' as Hazlitt put it. The supernatural world has
during that period removed itself further from civilised, culti-
vated humanity than it was ever before — in all time, heathen

VOL. I. B B



370 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE.

or Christian. There is, at this moment, infinitely less prac-
tical belief in an invisible world, or even apprehension of it,
than at any previous historical era, whether Egyptian, classic,
or mediaeval. It is only within the last century and a half,
the faculty of seeing visions could have been one to bring a
man's sanity into question. Ever before, by simple, believing
Romanist, by reverent, awe-struck pagan, or in the fervent
East, the exceptional power had been accepted as a matter
of course in gifted men, and had been turned to serious
account in the cause of religion. Even so late a manifestation
of this abiding tendency (the visionary) in all spiritual per-
sons, as that in the case of Jacob Boehmen in Lutheran time,
excited, not sceptical disbelief, but pedantic hostility as,
presumably, a delusive gift from the Father of Evil rather
than from the Author of all Good.

Another source of the false estimate formed of Blake by
many, is traceable to the ' wild and hurling words ' he would
utter in conversation, — especially when provoked. In society,
people would disbelieve and exasperate him, would set upon
the gentle yet fiery-hearted mystic, and stir him up into
being extravagant, out of a mere spirit of opposition. Then
he would say things on purpose to startle, and make people
stare. In the excitement of conversation he would exaggerate
his peculiarities of opinion and doctrine, would express a
floating notion or fancy in an extreme way, without the
explanation or qualification he was, in reality, well aware
it needed ; taking a secret pleasure in the surprise and oppo-
sition such views aroused. ' Often,' — to this effect writes
Mr. Linnell, — ' he said things on purpose to puzzle and

* provoke those who teased him in order to bring out his
' strongest peculiarities. With the froward, he showed him-
' self froward, but with the gentle, he was as amiable as a
' child. . . . His eccentricities have been enlarged upon
' beyond the truth. He was so far from being so absurd in
' his opinions, or so nearly mad as has been represented, that

* he always defended Christian truth against the attacks of



MAD OR NOT MAD? 371

' infidels, and its abuse by the superstitious. ... It must be
' confessed, however, he uttered, occasionally, sentiments sadly

* at variance with sound doctrine.'

Some persons of a scientific turn were once discoursing
pompously and, to him, distastefully, about the incredible
distance of the planets, the length of time light takes to
travel to the earth, &c., when he burst out, ' 'Tis false ! I was
walking down a lane the other day, and at the end of it I
touched the sky with my stick ; ' perhaps with a little covert
sophistry, meaning that he thrust his stick out into space,
and that, had he stood upon the remotest star, he could
do no more ; the blue sky itself being but the limit of our
bodily perceptions of the Infinite which encompasses us.
Scientific individuals would generally make him come out
with something outrageous and unreasonable. For he had
an indestructible animosity towards what, to his devout, old-
world imagination, seemed the keen polar atmosphere of
modern science. In society, once, a cultivated stranger, as
a mark of polite attention, was showing him the first number
of The Mechanics Magazine. ' Ah, sir,' remarked Blake,
with bland emphasis, * these things we artists HATE ! ' The
latter years of Blake's life were an era when universal homage
was challenged for mechanical science, — as for some new
Evangel ; with a triumphant clamour on the part of superficial
enthusiasts, which has since subsided.

Yet, as Mr. Kirkup reports, Blake would on occasion,
waive, with ' true courtesy, the question of his spiritual life,

* if the subject seemed at all incomprehensible or offensive ;
' he would no more obtrude than suppress his faith, and
' would practically accept and act upon the dissent or distaste
' of his companions without visible vexation or the rudeness

* of a thwarted fanatic'

After all, no candid person would, even in society, have
taken Blake for mad. Nor did he really believe his own
vaunt, say his friends, when he uttered such things as the
above, or as, ' I can reach the sun with my hand, if I stretch

B B 2



-i^]! LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE.

it out,' &c. He believed them only in a non-natiiral sense.
If it gave him pleasure to think of the welkin, as the old
Hebrews did, as a smooth surface which he might feel with
his hand, he would believe it as well as he could ; contending
(among friends) that the idea had a spiritual reality. For,
to recur to the explanation of his character I lately quoted,
he was ' not mad, but perverse and wilful ; ' believing a thing
because he chose to do so. His reasoning powers were far
inferior, as are, more or less, those of all artists, to his per-
ceptive, above all to his perceptions of beauty. He elected
his opinions because they seemed beautiful to him, and
fulfilled ' the desires of his mind.' Then he would find
reasons for them. Thus, Christianity was beautiful to him,
and was accepted even more because it satisfied his love
of spiritual beauty, than because it satisfied his religious
and moral sense. Again, the notion was attractive and
beautiful to him that ' Christianity is Art,' and conversely,
that ' Art is Christianity : ' therefore he believed it. And
it became one of his standing theological canons, which, in
his sibylline writings, he is for ever reiterating.

Both in his books and in conversation, Blake was a vehe-
ment assertor ; \(try decisive and very obstinate in his
opinions, when he had at once taken them up. And he was
impatient of control, or of a law in anything, — in his Art, in
his opinions on morals, religion, or what not. If artists be
divided into the disciplined and undisciplined, he must fall
under the latter category. To this, as well as to entire want
of discipline in the literary art, was due much of the inco-
herence in his books and design ; incoherence and wildness,
which is another source of the general inference embodied
by Wordsworth and Southey, who knew him only in his
poems, when they described him as a man 'of great, but
undoubtedly insane genius.' If for insane we read nndis-
ciplined, or ill-balanced, I think we shall hit the truth.

I have spoken of Blake's daring heterodoxy on religious
topics. He not only believed in a pre-existent state, but



MAD OR NOT MAD ? 373

had adopted, or thought out for himself, many of the
ideas of the early Gnostics ; and was otherwise so erratic
in his religious opinions as to shock orthodox Churchmen.
Once, in later years, a disputant got up and left his com-
pany. ' Ah,' said Blake, ' we could not get on at all : he
wanted to teach me, and I to teach him.' A transcendental
Christian rather than a literal one, he would often hazard
wild assertions about Christ ; yet would consider that a
believer only in His historical character, in reality denied
Him. ' Forgiveness of sins ' was the corner-stone of Chris-
tianity to Blake's mind. He was for ever inscribing the
tenet over his Gates of Paradise ^.nd elsewhere. The English
Church, as he thought, too little inculcated it. He had a
sentimental liking for the Romish Church, and, among other
paradoxes, would often try to make out that priestly
despotism was better than kingly. ' He believed no subjects
' of monarchies were so happy as the Pope's;' which sounds
still more absurd now, than in times nearer those of the
First Napoleon, when the poor Pope had, for a while, seemed
the victim of militaiy force, and an object of legitimate
sympathy. Blake's friend may well add : * I fancy this was
' one of his wilful sayings, and meant that he beheved priests
' to be more favourable to liberty than kings : v/hich he cer-
' tainly did. He loved liberty, and had no affection for
' statecraft or standing armies, yet no man less resembled the
' vulgar radical. His sympathies were rather with Milton,
' Harrington, and Marvel — not with Milton as to his puri-
' tanism, but his love of a grand, ideal scheme of republi-
' canism ; though I never remember his speaking of the
' American institutions : I suppose Blake's republic would
' always have been ideal.' From the short poem entitled
Thames and Ohio (see vol. ii.) it would, however, almost seem
as if Blake had, at one moment, a passing project of emigrat-
ing to America. We must assuredly number among his more
wilful assertions the curious hypothesis, ' that the Bonaparte
*of Italy was killed, and that another was somehow substituted



374 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE.

* from the exigent want of the name, who was the Bonaparte
' of the Empire ! He referred to the different physiognomies
' (as he thought) in the earlier and later portraits. But,
' stranger still, he gave me the (forgotten) name of some
' public man — ambassador, or something of the sort — who
' assured him such was the case ; and a very plausible story
' he made of it,' says the same friend.

Similar latitude of speculation was, as we have seen,
cultivated on ethics. Practically obedient to moral law, a
faithful husband, and temperate in all his habits, Blake is
for ever, in his writings, girding at the ' mere moral law,' as
being the letter which killeth. His conversation on social
topics, his writings, his designs, were equally marked by
theoretic licence and virtual guilelessness ; for he frankly
said, described, and drew everything as it arose to his mind.

* Do you think,' he once said in familiar conversation, and
in the spirit of controversy, * if I came home and discovered
' my wife to be unfaithful, I should be so foolish as to take
' it ill ? ' Mrs. Blake was a most exemplary wife, yet was so
much in the habit of echoing and thinking right whatever he
said that, had she been present, adds my informant, he is
sure she would have innocently responded, ' 0/ course not ! '
' But,' continues Blake's friend, ' I am inchned to think
' (despite the philosophic boast) it would have gone ill with

* the offenders.'



^



/







â–ºJ



I









J ' â– 






):



i IM



'3 'â–  â–  ^









I



//






_


^


K


X\ ^




S:


^




..^








H




<,






V;


t^






i




^




-^-




s




S'i




,\'



CHAPTER XXXVI.

DECLINING HEALTH : DESIGNS TO DANTE. 1824—1827.

[^T. 67 — 70.]

While the Job was in progress, Blake had, among other
work, assisted, from August to December, 1824, in engraving
a portrait from his friend Linnell's hand, of Mr. Lowry, and
perhaps in some other plates. It was during this period,
also, Mr. Linnell introduced him to the knowledge of Dante,
and commissioned a series of drawings from the Divina Coin-
media, to be hereafter engraved; justly thinking Blake 'the
' very man and the only ' to illustrate the great mediaeval
master of supernatural awe and terror. While still engaged
over the engravings to Job, Blake set to work full of energy,
sketching, while confined to bed by a sprained foot, the first
outlines of the whole, or nearly the whole, of this new series,
in a foHo volume of a hundred pages, which Mr. Linnell had
given him for the purpose. This was during the years 1824
to 1826. With characteristic fervour and activity of intellect,
he, at sixty-seven years of age, applied himself to learning
Italian, in order to read his author in the original. Helped
by such command of Latin as he had, he taught himself the
language in a few weeks ; sufficiently, that is, to comprehend
that difficult author substantially, if not grammatically : just
as, earlier in life, he had taught himself something of Latin,
French, and even Greek,



3/6 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1824— 1827.

The drawings after Dante, at first dividing Blake's time
with the engravings of the Job, engrossed nearly the whole
of it during the brief remnant of his life. They amount to
a hundred in all, scarcely any quite finished ; presenting his
conceptions in all stages, in fact, from the bare outline to
high finish.

These designs (which will be found catalogued, with a few
remarks, in List No. i of the Annotated Catalogue, vol. ii.)
form the largest series ever undertaken by Blake, except those